Newsroom24x7 Desk

Coimbatore: A joint operation by the Tamil Nadu, Andhra Pradesh, Kerala and Karnataka Police on Monday led to the arrest of 2 top Maoist leader and three others near Coimbatore.

Among those arrested is Roopesh and his wife, both natives of Kerala. Roopesh was wanted by the police for ten years.

According to police sources, the arrested Maoist leaders were allegedly engaged in building a strategy to carve out a Southern corridor for the Maoists, who ae also called the naxalites.

After the success registered by the Greyhounds, the elite special force of Telangana and AP states which wiped out naxal terrorisim out of the states of Telangana and AP, the Maoists are once again desperate to regroup and assert their position in areas like Khammam in Andhyra Pradesh and Ghadchiroli in Maharashtra. In the meanwhile, they have remained deeply entrenched in the Bastar area of Chhattisgarh state and have been striking their targets at will and inflicting heavy casualties. In neighbouring Madhya Pradesh, there are more than half a dozen districts where the movement of Maoists has been recorded on a number of occasions. The Naxalites have been using Madhya Pradesh territory as a safe haven and also targeting development related projects in the state. They have been active in the Balaghat district for more than two decades. They were behind the murder of state minister for transport Likhiram Kavre in his native village in Balaghat district in December 1999.

The Maoists have succeeded in penetrating and are deeply entrenched in a corridor stretching through Andhra Pradesh, Telangana, Chhattisgarh, Madhya Pradesh, Odisha, Bihar, Jharkhand, Uttar Pradesh and West Bengal – all the way up to Nepal. The arrest of top Maoist leaders on Monday is significant and a crucial development as the Naxalites were planning to build a red corridor in the South.